In Warfare, Alex Garland and Mendoza got to work reconstructing that day in Ramadi through first-hand accounts of those who were there.
Reconstructing Combat as Group Effort
“Warfare” is dedicated to Elliott Miller, a medic and sniper who was one of the severely injured and has no memory of the day.
Memory is imperfect under normal circumstances let alone combat situations from 20 years ago.
Mendoza himself was disoriented after the I.E.D. blast and remembers things in fragments. The reconstruction thus became a group effort.
“It’s interesting when you have two people with a conflicting memory, but they’re both telling the truth. There are gaps where the conflicts are so complex that you have to either omit something because you can’t rely on it sufficiently or you just have to choose one version.”
The film was made inexpensively, on sets constructed in a suburb north of London on a former WWII airfield that’s now a studio.
Mendoza worked closely with the young cast of young Hollywood stars, including D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai (who plays Mendoza), Will Poulter, Charles Melton, Kit Connor, Noah Centineo and Cosmo Jarvis.
The actors underwent a three-week training based on a SEAL program designed to prepare soldiers for moments of intense stress and fatigue. Mendoza would also give the guys playing the leaders impossible tasks and timelines that he knew they would fail, then critique and drill them for it.
The memory rule was strict–no studio notes or additions from anyone who wasn’t there.
The film begins in an unconventional way, with the men bouncing up and down to Swedish DJ Eric Prydz’s club ready anthem “Call on Me” and the silly music video set in an aerobics class.
It was a video they really had on a thumb drive, one of the few entertainment options available. Charles Melton’s character would put it on before they went out.
“It kind of became a ritual,” Mendoza said. “We were just silly. And it was a way for me to show how young we were.”
For Garland, the film demystifies the idea of Navy SEALs as supermen, presenting them instead as young men.
“Well-trained, but subject to concussion, stress, confusion, just the physical difficulty of pulling on a bit of equipment as things are intense and oppressive around you,” he said.
Warfare is not a political statement or commentary on Iraq. “Why does reality need something bolted on alongside it?” Garland said. “If everything has an agenda, where’s the discussion? Where is the discussion if everybody is planting flags?
As we can see in our lived life, it doesn’t lead to discussion, it just leads to encampment. And I don’t want to participate in that.”
The experience was therapeutic for Mendoza, who avoids seeinf war films because they so often get it wrong.
For a film that eschews so many Hollywood cliches, Warfare actually ends with something common for genre films based on true stories: photos of the real people involved, from the service members to the Iraqi family whose house was overtaken.
Some even show them on set, with Garland and Mendoza and the actors near their real-life counterparts. Many faces are blurred for security reasons.
Garland knows that this breaks the spell of what audiences have just experienced, but it’s an intentional gesture.
“I wanted to end with a reminder that these were actors, this was a construction, there were blue screens, there were prosthetics, but there were also real people, and this is what they looked like,” Garland said. “It’s a complicated thing. It’s a common device. It felt odd not doing it. There was something true about saying that this is a reconstruction, but it was reconstructed by these men.”
